Australia’s foreign minister Penny Wong is expected to attend the annual Asean meeting. (EPA Images pic)
SYDNEY: The Asia-Pacific region is seeing more destabilising actions, according to Australia’s foreign minister, who cited China’s recent missile test and its military buildup as issues where nations want reassurance from Beijing.
“Times are tough – we see behavior which is destabilising, we see a lot of challenges for peace and security,” Penny Wong said in an interview with Bloomberg Television in Manila today as Southeast Asian nations meet.
“We’ve seen the largest military build-up since World War II in our region,” she said, adding that while China might argue it has a right to do that, “what other countries would want in the face of the fastest military build-up we have seen is assurances about intent, assurances around transparency”.
Wong is attending the annual meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), along with US state secretary Marco Rubio and Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi.
“The nations that make up Asean are central to securing Australia’s strategic interests as they are so close,” Wong said.
She added that while the country’s principal strategic relationship is still with the US, it’s working hard to build ties with the Philippines, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia and others in the region.
Since coming to office in 2022, Australia’s centre-left government has been working on strengthening relations with nations across the region, signing defence deals with Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Indonesia and India, as well as other deals with a number of Pacific island nations.
Canberra has also improved ties with Beijing after they collapsed during the pandemic, though relations haven’t returned to the friendly level seen a decade ago.
Australia is still protecting sensitive domestic sectors from Chinese investors and also trying to limit Chinese access to the Pacific.
Australia operates a delicate diplomatic balance between its economic interests in China, the nation’s largest trading partner, and its seven-decade security alliance with the US.
That’s become even more complicated given the unpredictability of the Trump administration.
